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FILM VIEW

FILM VIEW; A Bambi For the 90's, Via Shakespeare

Published: June 19, 1994

(Page 2 of 3)

And if a child responds to "The Lion King" on some level that is deeper and more intense than a pow-pow Saturday morning cartoon, that is because the people who made this movie are trying for something more complex here, and children know it.

What there is in "The Lion King," along with sometimes breathtaking animation and well-cast voices, is an interesting mix of "Hamlet," "Bambi" and "The Jungle Book," all shot through with some contemporary sensibility about men who can't grow up. Is this just a late-20th-century take on "Hamlet" imbued with self-help books and actualization therapy? Instead of a young man who could not make up his mind, we have a young man who cannot share his feelings and has trouble with commitment. Still, when the ghost of the dead king appears to the young lion and charges him to depose his treacherous uncle to reclaim the kingdom, you can't help looking around for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (played here by a wart hog and a meerkat).

Yes, the father dies. And there is a stampede, which is some kind of heroic triumph of animation. But the stampede is not so much scary as it is inexorable, an animal-world event, even if it is provoked by the evil uncle and his hyena henchmen.

Yes, the cub is tortured by guilt, thinking that he started the wildebeests running and is therefore responsible for his father's death. But even small children will have no trouble identifying whose fault it really is; Jeremy Irons gives the evil uncle, Scar, a personality worthy of the long and distinguished line of Disney cartoon villains. And cartoon villains have always had a certain license to be evil, just because they are not real people, and children can see that they are not.

In "The Lion King," they aren't people at all. It's always a little tricky to know how children absorb animal stories. "Born Free" was the great lion movie of my childhood, another movie about a lion cub who loses a parent, and I can dimly recall discussions of whether the hunting (and eating) scenes were too strong for children. In addition to the loss of Bambi's mother, there is Babar's mother, killed by a wicked hunter on the third page of "The Story of Babar"; within two pages, Babar is consoling himself by buying new clothes. In my experience, children are interested in the death of Babar's mother, and then quickly curious about Babar's new clothes.

I cried when Bambi's mother got shot, but my son, who was then 4, did not; he was interested in what would happen next. Parents are terrified of dying and leaving their child unprotected. For children, the issues are often different.

Note it was Bambi's and Babar's mothers who were killed off. Most Disney cartoon features have not included mothers at all; the title character in "The Little Mermaid" has only a father, as do Princess Jasmine in "Aladdin" and Belle in "Beauty and the Beast." Snow White and Cinderella, of course, have evil stepmothers. Bambi has a mother, but she dies; Dumbo's mother spends most of the movie locked up.

IN "THE LION KING," IT IS THE father who dies. Though this may be dictated by the plot structure of "Hamlet," it is also connected to the movie's 90's-style celebration of the involved dad. Bambi's father, after all, was the archetypal distant father of the 1940's, the kind of stag who would stay out of sight and let his son take the hard knocks, and only show up at the end to point the way to manhood. But Mufasa in "The Lion King" is out there romping with his cub, offering sensitive advice about what it means to be the King of Beasts: "I'm only brave when I have to be," he tells his admiring son.

Will children see the deeper themes -- Disney describes the movie as "allegorical" -- or will they simply be entertained by the surface story? Will they understand the central moral, that Simba has to confess the guilt he has been hiding, and has to give up his carefree bachelorhood and accept the responsibilities of leadership? Well, some children will understand some of it. And some of this New-Age-tinged message is there for adults, as are the numerous and clever animated references, from the Busby Berkeley animal acrobatics to the Leni Riefenstahl Nuremberg rally scene in which Scar reviews his hyena troops. You don't have to understand these associations to appreciate the scenes, and, similarly, most of the worrying about Oedipal overtones, guilt and responsibility will be done by parents.

It all comes down to what is real and what is not-real, which can admittedly be a complex question for children. A few months ago my 4-year-old daughter, Josephine, was going to her first opera. Her opera-loving but perhaps overambitious father prepared her as carefully as possible, playing his favorite recording of "La Traviata," a little each day, explaining the story, showing her a photograph of Maria Callas, and teaching Josephine to listen for her voice of voices. Toward the end of the week, I came into the living room to find Josephine sobbing hysterically on the couch, with the music blaring and her father looking flummoxed.